The Rumpus.net » Filmhttp://therumpus.net
Books, Music, Movies, Art, Politics, Sex, OtherSun, 02 Aug 2015 16:50:32 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.2The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Queen of Decayhttp://therumpus.net/2015/08/the-saturday-rumpus-essay-queen-of-decay/
http://therumpus.net/2015/08/the-saturday-rumpus-essay-queen-of-decay/#commentsSat, 01 Aug 2015 13:00:13 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=141413I wish it had been: Amy was a brilliant and tortured artist. Lets explore her brilliance. Let’s watch her perform.]]>There’s something about watching a beautiful woman self-destruct that we can’t turn away from. Asif Kapadia’s new documentary, Amy, that follows Amy Winehouse from age 14 until her death at 27 in 2011, had the chance to redeem her from the paparazzi-fueled spectacle of tragic victim martyred to the media and the music industry. But Kapadia seems, at least in part, to pick up where the media left off—cashing in on images of Amy’s wasted body, eyes rolling back in her skull, her smeared makeup and scratched-up face, her crumbling teeth, coke-lined nostrils, scenes of her desperately clinging to her husband, her father, her bodyguards, and managers. Her musical genius is almost an aside in the film, dashed off most convincingly in two short scenes in the beginning and a scene with Tony Bennett at the end.

I liked watching Amy. I loved hearing her voice again, catching rare but precious glimpses into the sharp-witted sparkling young woman she was before ravaged by addictions and celebrity. I’m also guilty of rubbernecking—what happens when a person finally submits to their darkness is fascinating to watch, and lets a viewer vicariously experience the relief of just giving up the fight. But there is a fascination with decay, a person dying before our eyes, the skeletal, the ghosted, that is covertly harmful. It’s the same fascination that uses emaciated models to sell dresses, and models posing dead-eyed and hollow-cheeked, legs askew, to sell designer handbags. Women’s death and suffering sells. It’s sickly sexy, and it’s dangerous.

In her article for Pitchfork, Molly Beauchemin contrasts Amy with Montage of Heck, Brett Morgan’s biopic of Kurt Cobain that came out this January. She claims a comparison of the two films displays the sexist double standard of the music industry and the media, one in which a man’s musical brilliance is showcased with almost tangential mention about his struggles with addictions, whereas the narrative of the woman focuses on her downward spiral sensationalized by paparazzi and a public hungry to watch a celebrity unravel.

This double standard is well-precedented. Beauchemin cites coverage of other deaths of young women in the music industry—Janis Joplin, Billie Holliday, Whitney Houston—who were rendered as “substance-addled messes,” while reporters depicted the deaths of men like Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, and Keith Moon as flamboyant geniuses with some “sensual excesses.” Beauchemin writes that in Amy:

A slurry of ugly tabloid images fly across the screen and we see paparazzi preying upon her existential nadir—meanwhile, Montage of Heck posits a cache of neat magazine covers that offer obsequious, reverential coverage of a man whose drug addiction was portrayed as incidental to his supreme talent.

In an interview with the Guardian, Amy’s father, Mitchell Winehouse, deemed the film “horrible.” After a private viewing, he told the filmmakers, “You should be ashamed of yourselves. You had the opportunity to make a wonderful film and you’ve made this.” He also claimed the film was “both misleading and contains some basic untruths” about her family and management. Granted, Winehouse has copious reasons for discrediting the film. It portrays him as an absentee father who reenters his daughter’s life to ride on the coattails of her ascent to wealth and fame. Winehouse claims he was always trying to protect his daughter and work tirelessly for her best interest. It’s hard to know where the truth lies, probably, as it usually does, somewhere between the two narratives. But his point is well-taken—the film eschews Amy the artist for Amy the addict, and that’s a show we’ve already seen.

I wanted more footage of outstanding performances, improvisations and songs I hadn’t yet heard. The film does grant some access into the private archives of Amy as friend, daughter, lover, and wife. But we hardly learn anything about her early musical training, we rarely see her brilliant performances, triumphs, and successes. More outstanding performances and improvisations can be found in a cursory YouTube search. We do see some notebook scribbling, some shots of Amy recording in the studio, but this storyline is overshadowed by the much larger focus on Amy as victim.

And she was a victim of so much—bulimia, depression, an absent father, an enabling mother, drug and alcohol addictions, co-dependent relationships, men in power over her—namely her father, her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, her manager, Raye Cosbert, all of whom, the film implies, pushed her past her breaking point for personal gain. As Tony Bennett points out towards the end of the film, she was also a victim of her youth. He said, “ Life teaches you how to live it if you live long enough.” Amy did not live long enough to learn that lesson, nor how to manage worldwide celebrity, Internet stardom, and all the baggage she brought with her.

There’s no doubt that Amy’s depression and addictions are part of her story—in fact they charged her music with the depth, urgency, and strength that made it so famous and well-loved. It gave her voice its distinctive haunt. Without her demons her lyrics and melodies may have joined the rest of the pop music at the time, music she herself criticized as shallow and unoriginal—one-offs about romantic love or lust or money. She made her music because she desperately needed it—it was her lifeline, therapy, medicine. In the film she dismissed medical treatment of her depression saying that she can pick up her guitar for an hour and feel better. But music can’t replace treatment, and while drugs and subsuming herself in her passion for Blake delivered temporary respite from her inner black, it wasn’t enough. The film doesn’t focus on her demons in service of her music, it dips into them on their own, brings us with her into the darkness she couldn’t see her way out of.

If this film had a thesis it would be: Amy, a brilliant talented artist, was led astray by men in power. She self-medicated with music but also with bulimia, drugs, and alcohol, and this killed her. I wish it had been: Amy was a brilliant and tortured artist. Lets explore her brilliance. Let’s watch her perform. And, like Montage of Heck, let’s portray her death quickly, with dignity. Perhaps this is a naive wish. I know sex and scandal sells. But we had plenty of that during her life. I wanted someone to come and raise her out of that in her death.

Kapadia failed to elevate Amy from that swirling mess of media filth, but Amy did succeed in exposing the paparazzi’s ruthlessness and carnivorous appetite and the way that can drive a person mad. Much of the film’s footage comes from the paparazzi who hounded her. Anthony Lane writes in the New Yorker, “You ask yourself if ‘Amy’ might not be half in league with the tabloid frenzy that it purports to scorn.” Towards the end of the film, Amy’s bodyguard, Andrew Morris, reports that the night of her death she was watching YouTube clips of herself. He reports that she said to him, “Man, I can sing.” And then, “If I could give it all back just to walk down the street with no hassles, I would.”

If Kapadia fell short of restoring the focus on Amy’s life to its rightful place—on her music—he did so with the complicity of the free world. With his film, he gave us what we’ve proven we want—to tear down and watch fall what we’ve built up—like we’ve done with Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Miley Cyrus. Their dissolution sells magazines. But why?

Beauchemin believes that successful women upset a major cultural convention, one we are hungry to set right again. Beauchemin writes, “When women succeed as Winehouse did, we anticipate their downfall and pounce hard, relish the sillage of failure when we get a whiff… We martyr our women because we fear their greatness.”

One of the hardest things for me to see in the movie and in pictures online is how stripped down and ravaged her body became from her eating disorder—in some shots she is reminiscent of skeletal prisoners and torture victims. And we all watched, hungrily, and still she sang, was photographed, interviewed. This kind of intrigue is that it strips women of their power, of their very flesh—it gives the impression: ladies, if you want to be noticed, suffer like this, starve like this, bleed out in public like this, die like this. We’ll pay good money to watch.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/08/the-saturday-rumpus-essay-queen-of-decay/feed/1The Saturday Rumpus Review: Güeroshttp://therumpus.net/2015/07/the-saturday-rumpus-review-gueros/
http://therumpus.net/2015/07/the-saturday-rumpus-review-gueros/#commentsSat, 11 Jul 2015 13:00:25 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=140727After settling in Paris in 1902, Ranier Maria Rilke became Auguste Rodin’s secretary. Aware the writer had been in a creative drought, the sculptor recommended he visit the Jardin des Plantes and watch an animal. Rilke chose to document the movements of a panther, and his visits culminated in perhaps his most famous poem, a piece he titled in honor of the mammal he had intimately studied. “The Panther” resulted in a refined aesthetic for Rilke. His observations became his art: he developed what he labeled as his “thing poems,” abandoning his subjective verses in favor of objective ones that represented his personal ideas, thoughts, and emotions. Here, in the first stanza, the panther paces:

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,has grown so weary that it cannot holdanything else. It seems to him there area thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

Committed to memory, these are the lines uttered by Federico “Sombra” Ruiz (Tenoch Huerta), the student-poet of Antonio Ruizpalacios’s debut feature, Güeros. It’s 1999 in Mexico City, and as a result of the ongoing protests at his college, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Sombra has been out of school. Uncertain of his future, he finds himself plagued by constant panic attacks, bouts of anxiety he describes as the hauntings of a “tiger.” As he quotes Rilke to Ana (Ilse Salas), a girl whom he loves but has never quite dated, he watches the creature of his nightmares walk back and forth in captivity at the zoo. It’s a literal confrontation of his metaphorical fear, a visual take on Rilke’s words: to view Güeros is to see a “thing poem” on the screen, to witness something like “The Panther” materialize. Seen through physical objects (a cassette player, a rundown car, a neglected computer), the mystical Mexico City, with its winding roads, its curbside gardens, its cyclical aimlessness, becomes a symbol for Güeros’s struggling and disaffected youths, an external rendering of what’s most internal.

Admittedly, I’m a sucker for this sort of mythology, the potential influence an artistic discipline has on another: the notion that Henry James stopped by John Singer Sargent’s Parisian flat to see Madame X in-process holds many implications for me, namely that the novelist not only admired the portraits of his American companion abroad but that he could have seen the painter toiling with his masterpiece. Shot in black-and-white, in the “Academy ratio” of Golden Age Hollywood, Güeros has already elicited several comparisons within its medium’s tradition: its shifting static-to-shaky camerawork and Godardian existentialism are credited to the French New Wave; its Mexico City shares similarities with Jim Jarmusch’s New York of the 1980s; and its characters bear resemblance to those in other Mexican art house films, notably the lost souls in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También and Duck Season. However, not enough critical attention and credit has been given to the film’s literary elements, figures, and allusions, especially considering so much of it centers on our words—on what “lies behind” our passions and our obsessions, our resistance and our ambivalence, our actions and our language.

The term “güero” is now so embedded in the cultural fabric of Mexico that Ruizpalacios didn’t realize until the final cut before the premiere date, at the Berlin Film Festival last year, that foreign audiences might not recognize it. In an interview with FilmmakerMagazine, he reveals how his production team “quickly looked the word up in several dictionaries and added the definition at the very beginning.” Light-skinned or light-haired, “güero” derives from huero, an empty egg lost during the incubation period, but it’s “thrown around” so much in Mexico, Ruizpalacios remarks, that “nobody ever stops to wonder what they really mean, what [they’re] really saying”: “they are strong words charged with the desire to place a barrier between you and… whomever the other might be.” Ruizpalacios introduces this dichotomy with Tomás (Sebastián Aguirre), Sombra’s troublesome younger brother, who arrives in the capital after dropping a water balloon from the roof of a building and onto a stranger’s baby: their worn-out mother in Veracruz “can’t handle” him anymore and sends him away. Together in Mexico City, the brothers have no trouble becoming the topic of conversation. Each person who meets Tomás instantly remarks that he isn’t dark like Sombra. Tomás knows Sombra as “Fede”: he hasn’t heard the new nickname (the English equivalence of “shadow”), and his brother doesn’t allow him say it, just as he doesn’t permit him to use “esquirol” (a strikebreaker).

Instead, Sombra boldly declares that he and his roommate, Santos (Leonardo Ortizgris), are on “strike from the strike.” Really, though, they look and act more like James Franco and Seth Rogen in PineappleExpress than a duo of off-duty revolutionaries. They’ve gone from scholars to restless slackers. They both have theses to complete, but with the college closed, neither of them does any coursework: Sombra fails to master a simple card trick; Santos reads the newspaper. They have nothing to eat, they never wash their dishes, and they convince Aurora (Camila Lora), the girl who lives below them, to plug in an extension cord and power their appliances. At eight o’clock, they retire to bed, when the parents of their downstairs neighbor come home and rid them of their stolen electricity.

Presumably, Sombra isn’t the type of male influence Tomás’s mother intended for her son, continuing to mourn the passing of his dad. The sole thing that brings Sombra any joy, it seems, is the voice of the girl he loves. During the day, he, Santos, and Tomás lounge on the hood of the car and listen to Ana, the host of a pirate radio show for the movement, as she discusses politics: the protestors are debating between a silent march and the takeover of the television stations, and as she argues in favor of the former, she also reads a pair of poems—one written by her, the other, entitled “The Crane,” by Sombra. Ana was the person, we later learn, who exposed Rilke to Sombra, but his poetic roots may rest further back in time: though Sombra and Tomás’s father is a vague and mysterious figure, he introduced his sons to Epigmenio Cruz, a folk singer who, had he been more widely known, could have allegedly changed Mexican rock and roll. According to Tomás, he “once made Bob Dylan cry.” However, we never familiarize ourselves with Cruz’s songs, as Sombra, Santos, and Ana only hear them on Tomás’s headphones: whenever they put them over their ears, utter silence permeates. Cruz produced a single album, Los Güeros, and following its release, he seemingly vanished, transforming into more of a legend than an actual human being.

The fact that Cruz calls his record Los Güeros is the type of overt symbolism that almost requires no explanation, yet the analysis it invites proves too telling: since we don’t know the content of the work, we don’t know the identity of his “güeros.” As viewers, we’re in the position of so many Mexicans who are—and were—deprived of his songs. Still, the journey to find the man successfully propels the latter half of the film, and it’s Tomás’s hope to find the elusive musician that finally brings Sombra and Santos out of their ratty kitchen and onto the streets: it evolves into a mission for all of them, including Ana, who soon joins them. They set-off on a road trip that goes essentially nowhere, a darkly comic adventure that gets interrupted with misguided turns, dead ends, chases, a brief kidnapping, a faulty engine, a celebration, and eventually the protest itself. When something bad happens, it’s usually because Santos or Sombra, the alternating drivers, take a right instead of going straight, or go straight instead of taking a right. When they end-up somewhere crucial (the university, or Cruz’s favorite bars), it’s always by accident. Much like Roberto Bolaño’s wandering critics in search of their hero, Benno von Archimboldi, in 2666, or his visceral realists looking for the “mother” of their artistic movement, Cesárea Tinajero, in The Savage Detectives, Ruizpalacios’s characters aren’t so much looking for a source of meaning than they are running away from what plagues them: Tomás is unable to behave in Veracruz; Sombra and Santos can’t decide if they should grab picket signs, or wait for the unrest to dissipate; and Ana battles, as a woman and a vocal advocate for peace, to solidify her place as a leader. Not even the director himself seems able to commit to his purpose, and in the two distinct cases when Güeros breaks the fourth wall—once to debate the quality of the screenplay, then again to mock the current state of Mexican cinema and the stereotypes it produces—Ruizpalacios makes his most pervasive theme explicit: history won’t wait for any of them, and it doesn’t have to remember them, either.

At a certain point, traveling down the highway, Ana asks the men if anybody will notice if they die. When Tomás, Sombra, and Santos don’t have much of response, she turns-off the ignition and lets the vehicle rest in the middle lane, a stark, stationary contrast to the throngs of people marching for the future of free higher education. It’s an absurd, hyperbolically symbolic act that again triggers Bolaño, particularly the moment when Amulet’s Auxilio Lacouture, the “mother of Mexican poetry,” hides in a bathroom stall for thirteen days, the single person to resist the army’s violent invasion of UNAM in 1968. Although it never overtakes, the Tlatelolco massacre weighs in the background of the current events, a past that foreshadows the present. In other words, the cultural relevance of Tomás, Sombra, Santos, and Ana stays undecided, and it’s a question Ruizpalacios never forgets, as he often disarmingly shifts to the point-of-view of a new, peripheral character without warning. When a group of upper-class men, en route to a party celebration for a Mexican director, accost a convenience store employee about buying cigarettes after closing, it’s not until their harassment reaches a peak (they’re on the verge of pushing their way through the door) that Santos presents himself in the frame and intervenes. In Güeros’s opening scene, Ruizpalacios follows the frantic casualty of Tomás’s harmless prank, as she tries to get out the door with her crying baby; in a parallel sequence toward the end, he cuts to a young boy, similarly without context: we watch as the child flees from two bullies, grabs a brick, and climbing to the top of a bridge, dangles it over the highway. The difference between this kid and Tomás might be the difference between a brick and water balloon, but it’s also a clear indication that the perspective of Güeros’s mainly four-person cast doesn’t remain stable: they are at times the victims, and they are at times the heroes.

It’s a reminder that none of them are representative of Mexico City, but rather Mexico City—the falling bricks, the ideological slogans, the rhythms of poets, and the anger of a generation—is representative of them.

My favorite detail in Mad Max: Fury Road is the fact that this question ultimately goes unanswered. This film deeply critiques masculinity, and many feminist critics have, somewhat hastily, answered the above question with the word “men.” But a much deeper rabbit-hole awaits anyone willing to hold that question in their mind by itself, unresolved, without demanding an immediate answer.

The near-mystical context with which that phrase is situated in the movie does seem to demand this treatment. We first encounter it as graffiti in Immortan Joe’s chamber, abandoned by his “wives,” a painted middle-finger to the misogynistic mythology he’s woven in order to keep his tiny empire intact. The phrase is held up as a talisman against his obliterating ideology, against a massive, all-consuming religious narrative that traps everyone in this world where they are, powerless, dried-out, and denied any real rest or abundance.

The second time we encounter the phrase, it’s yelled at everyone’s favorite warboy as he’s dumped out of a moving vehicle by Splendid, the pregnant supermodel breeder. The sparkly pet names Joe gives “his” women only increase the horror of the entire situation (in addition to“Splendid”, there is also “Fragile”, “Capable”, etc.)

When Splendid utters the phrase, when we finally hear it out loud, it’s said as an incantation to ward off Nux’s bankrupt, toxic religious fervor. It’s meant to puncture the mythology of Joe, to make it clear that his tumor-ridden body will die, that all the ecstasy of the Witnessed kamikaze is a cardboard facade erected by a rotting dictator. This is an indictment of illusion, but also an indictment of the things these warboys care about most, and the moment she yelled the phrase I felt the question in myself.

Who killed the world, Devin?

But of course, our world isn’t actually dead yet. This is fiction, and we’re watching a movie. Nobody killed the world.

Yet here I am, implicit in this future. I know Mad Max is an indictment of the current direction of my civilization—an imagined post-apocalyptic mistake made by the worst things we do now, our logical conclusion. And I know that maleness, male aggression, the narratives around my gender, have a lot to do with how we reach that conclusion.

The story of Fury Road is a story about possessiveness, and about how generosity and compassion, the opposites of possessiveness, redeem the world and the individuals in it.

At the core of this struggle over generosity sits Max. He’s in this movie specifically so that we’re forced to be introspective about ourselves as men, forced to ask the question. He’s caused harm in the past, through inaction, maybe even through action, and repeatedly during the movie he’s forced to make a decision about how to allocate his ethics, his resources, his help, even his blood.

The movie could have been focused around Furiosa; she makes a better hero than Max, really, because her mission is what actually drives the plot. She’s the one who dreams of something better and makes it happen, and Max is drafted into her quest for hope.

But Furiosa is not the identity that needs deconstructing. She exists as a singular and hard jewel, alongside Max’s rapidly reformulating personhood. For once, the woman is the strong one, the baseline, the stable background against which masculinity’s crumbling edifice defines itself.

Max is a compelling damsel—introverted, emotional, caught up in something larger than he can fully understand. He throws himself into helping out with gusto, but still yields to Furiosa’s superior expertise (for example, when she uses him as a sniper-stand, sharpshooting at a level of distance and accuracy hopeless for Max). Max fronts the plan to take the Citadel, but his effort would be totally impotent if the women didn’t lend their warcraft and their zeal. Before Furiosa, there was no hope, no purpose, no narrative. Before her, as Max himself said, the only cause was survival. She is his leader.

She’s the one who screams like a banshee on that hilltop when she learns of the souring of the Green Place. There is no equivalent display of fury (naturally) by Max anywhere in the movie.

After she assassinates Joe, the level of her sacrifice becomes clear. She’s drained of her blood. She’s a warrior with a wound. She was stabbed. And Max nurses her back with his blood, just as if it were milk, his gentle trembling hands soothing her face and finding her vein, his emotions cracking wide open.

My point here is that all this stuff can also be framed the other way. Maybe Furiosa is Sleeping Beauty, awakened only by male agency. Maybe Max is co-opting the superior position by offering a plan. Maybe the fact that Max emerges first from Joe’s stolen car to whip the sheet off his body is a slight against the feminist cred of the film.

Or maybe Max helping his worshipped wounded champion out of the car, helping her to stand, propping her up as the hero, making it clear to the assembled masses that she’s in charge, and then disappearing into the crowd as she ascends to rulership—maybe all that is actually sincere. You know, one can hope. Maybe we should pay attention to Furiosa. They all seem to.

Behind all of this, deep at the core of the movie, is a conversation about male disposability.

Recently an article’s been making the rounds that purports to explain “why men exist” in evolutionary terms.

Now, anybody who knows anything about evolution knows that it’s a bottom-up process, not a top-down one. There is no “why”; life is a series of experiments. We trace the contingencies backward; we look at the structures and elements and forces that fell together, that resulted in what we are now, and that’s where we derive a sense of evolutionary “purpose”. But the basic process is not planned. Some things die and some things fuck and shit just happens.

But it’s very easy to fall into thinking that these mechanics should dictate our future purpose, too. That we should “fall in line with nature”, when experimentation and boundary-pushing are exactly the mechanisms nature used to produce all this in the first place.

The article and the research it describes argue that men were an evolutionary project developed because male competition for female attention and sex makes our species stronger. Sexual selection is great for our health as a species. The weak get weeded out.

Are we fighting for control of sexual access to women, in competition with each other? Immortan Joe was winning that game. In fact, in Mad Max, a different sort of principle had taken over: instead of behaving like individual competitive agents, the warboys were behaving like ants, or bees.

Joe developed his religion so the vast male hordes subordinate to him wouldn’t hesitate to blow themselves up to protect “his” food, “his” water, “his” gas, “his” women, like insect drones. He didn’t differentiate between things and people when it came to those women; hence their war cry “we are not things!”. But he didn’t differentiate between people and things with respect to the warboys either. They’re human bombs.

This isn’t really that far off from how that article defined male purpose. We’re fired from the womb like missiles, engines of conflict, created to weed each other out. We’re the refining file that sharpens the human project, but we’re also the flakes that fall away. Fetuses start out female; maleness is a disrupted chemical trajectory, a mad science project. We’re slow motion explosions designed to burn away the undesirable aspects of the human race. Is that what male “purpose” is? Is that what male “purpose” means?

Who killed the world?

Into the center of this anthill fall Furiosa and Max. They’re a twin force of rejection, aggressively and hopelessly (at first) carving out space against the dehumanizing nature, not just of civilization, but of this blasted, resource-stripped reality. Max doesn’t really need to be convinced to leave the anthill; they wanted to use him as a human blood-bag. Furiosa’s position is considerably more complicated—she had rank and power; she was one of the only women to climb the Citadel’s hierarchy. And she gave it all up. She smelled the rotten core of the thing and just couldn’t take it anymore.

I find myself wondering why the women were the first to rebel against this structure. Why didn’t the suicidal warboys think to themselves, hey, maybe we should take the water for ourselves? And the only solution I can come up with is that being male feels powerful. Blowing yourself up feels powerful. Being able to fight and act and move and leave the Citadel on raids was a convincing simulation of freedom. If you’re a warboy lost in the ecstatic haze of battle, heaven seems just that much closer.

The male-dominance trip in our culture has a similar narcotic effect. Hopped up on testosterone, we catapult through our lives looking for ways to get on top. The thrill of climbing the corporate ladder obfuscates the mid-life crisis at the summit. The glory of battle hides the devastation we leave behind us. This movie’s goal is to lay the whole narrative bare, exposed. To shove it in our faces, every bloody inch of it.

Who killed the world?

But of course, the enclave of women in the film are no less killers. No less burdened by the driving whip of survivalism. One of them makes it clear she’s exploded the skull of everyone she’s encountered out in the wastes with her rifle.

The earth-mother-seed thing some feminists are criticizing as essentialist is a red herring. Immortan Joe has way more seeds than those women. Way more. He has an entire industrial farming complex, flush with water and fertile soil—so much abundance that they make it their mission to steal it all from him. If anybody in the world of Mad Max is the earth-mother, it’s Immortan Joe.

All that said, there’s a perspective the women in this film have that the men just don’t. It’s hard to define, hard to locate. It may have something to do with hope. Something to do with the idea that they’re more than human missiles; more than cannon-fodder. The women seem capable of believing that. The men have much more difficulty with the idea.

It might behoove us as men to think about that. To think about our “purpose” as though it’s broader than that of provider, that of lover, that of sperm-carrier, that of blood-bag, that of missile. It may be the only kind of thinking that’s going to save us.

Max is a man-shaped hole, in many ways. A quiet non-person, a helper on Furiosa’s adventure. His introversion allows us, as men, to project our future onto him. What do we want to be? What are his motives? Why does he nurse Furiosa back to health with his blood-milk? Is he just further participating in male narratives about self-sacrifice and mating? Or is there something more going on? What is the Fury Road, anyway? Where does it lead?

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/07/the-saturday-rumpus-review-mad-max-fury-road/feed/2The Rumpus Interview with Me and Earl and the Dying Girlhttp://therumpus.net/2015/06/the-rumpus-interview-with-me-and-earl-and-the-dying-girl/
http://therumpus.net/2015/06/the-rumpus-interview-with-me-and-earl-and-the-dying-girl/#commentsFri, 19 Jun 2015 07:01:28 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=139866Me and Earl and the Dying Girl discuss their movie that went to Sundance and beyond.
]]>­­On June 17, 1994, two things happened: the police chased O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco down an LA freeway, and I met Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. I was staying on the couch of a friend of Jeff Sommerville, a close childhood friend, and she threw a party one night. Jeff arrived with Alfonso, his friend from NYU film school. I was modeling at the time, and my French actor boyfriend was visiting from Paris. He and Alfonso spent hours talking movies while the rest of us speculated about whether O.J. did it over cocktails while listening to Björk and The Orb. Jeff and I were twenty-four. Alfonso was twenty-one. A year later, the three of us got an apartment together in Los Angeles. Jeff temped for a while before getting hired to work on Polish Wedding, Alfonso enrolled at AFI, and I started college. Twenty years later, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, co-produced by Jeff and directed by Alfonso, won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at Sundance. Here’s how it happened.

***

The Rumpus: What was your role as co-producer of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl?

Jeff Sommerville: My role was mostly on the development side of things: having the book submitted to me, fighting to buy it, and then the long development process when we worked with Jesse [Andrews] and Dan Fogelman on the adaptation from book to screenplay.

Rumpus: How did you get involved with this project?

Sommerville: I was working at Indian Paintbrush and I had known Dan Fogelman, one of the producers, for a long time. He had fallen in love with this manuscript that he had gotten from his agency and had wanted to produce it and potentially direct it. The book was submitted to Indian Paintbrush and I read it and fell in love with it. And Dan had this plan that he wanted Jesse to adapt his own book into a screenplay even though Jesse hadn’t written a screenplay before. He was also a first-time novelist at the time, so it was an unusual circumstance, but the voice of the book was so special and funny and poignant that Dan’s plan of mentoring Jesse through the process and guiding him through how to write a screenplay was really enticing because Dan has a ton of experience and is a produced screenwriter himself. Because the voice of the book was so great, Dan felt that only Jesse could capture that in screenplay form. So we decided to make an offer and got it, and then the process started from there.

Rumpus: What made you fall in love with the book?

Sommerville: It made me laugh out loud over and over and made me cry at the end. I think there’s something very universal about the high school experience, about feeling like the outcast, about not fitting in that was incredibly relatable, not having been particularly popular myself in high school. It captured some very big picture, poignant lessons about life, but it was also laugh-out-loud funny. And you fell in love with these characters. There was this voice that was super authentic—the way that teenagers think, the way that teenagers talk. And there was something that was so honest and quirky and unpredictable about it. It never became sentimental even when it became emotional. It was honest and messy around the edges the way that real life is.

Rumpus: What was the process of getting Jesse to write the screenplay?

Sommerville: After we closed on the book deal, we flew [Andrews] out to LA and he stayed for a week. He came, I remember, on a Monday with Dan [Fogelman], and we talked through the things about the book that we really loved and what we thought a screenplay might look like. Then he and Dan went off and he spent the week at Dan’s house kind of getting screenwriting boot camp—watching movies and talking about process—and then on Friday of that same week they came back to Indian Paintbrush and Jesse pitched his version of what the screenplay was going to be. I knew right then it just felt so right. You could tell he understood storytelling on a deep level and understood the need to create more of a three-act structure because the style of his book is very stream of consciousness and a movie has to operate by more traditional three-act rules. So he really came in with a shape to the movie, and then he went off and started writing.

Rumpus: How long did it take him to write the screenplay?

Sommerville: Probably two or three months. He and Dan had their own process because Dan was mentoring him throughout as he was writing. And when they had a draft that they were ready to show us, we read it and we wrote notes from Indian Paintbrush, and then he went off and wrote another draft. That’s just a normal part of the developmental process. You just keep shaping the script until you get it where you want it to be.

Rumpus: How different was the final script from the novel?

Sommerville: It was fairly different. Because of the nature of a movie, we had to change certain parts of the novel, but what didn’t change is the spirit of the characters and the spirit of Jesse’s voice. It all felt very organic to what the source material was. I think that’s what’s most important, and he did that with flying colors.

Rumpus: Was the bedroom scene at the end written into the script?

Sommerville: That wasn’t in the original script. That was something Alfonso and Jesse worked on together. I think everyone’s favorite scene of the story was the Mr. McCarthy speech when he talks about how people’s lives keep unfolding even after they die, and [the bedroom scene] was really a great way to punctuate Greg’s journey and accept growing up. The Mr. McCarthy scene was in the first draft of the original script, but the whole thing about the cutouts with the scissors was something new because Alfonso wanted to find a more visual way instead of just through narration to show Greg learning something about Rachel.

Rumpus: What was it like working with Alfonso on this project?

Sommerville: We went to NYU together and met interning for a producer at the Tribeca Film Center, so I’ve known him for a long time. We’ve always been friends but have never had an opportunity to work together, so it was really a dream come true. He had a connection to the material that was very profound because of the recent loss of his father, so he really connected to the script and Greg’s journey in a very meaningful way. On top of that, he’s a cinephile and knows more about film history than probably anyone I know. So the material was so incredibly well suited to him at that time that I felt so fortunate that our paths crossed on this project when they did.

*

Rumpus: You went to film school at NYU and then at AFI. Describe your directing career since then.

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon: It’s been a slow climb, like super slow climb. It’s been long and hard. I always felt I was moving up, but part of me wishes I could have been here twenty years ago. But then this movie wouldn’t exist, had it not been for everything that’s happened in those years.

Rumpus: You worked on Scorsese’s Casino while you were still an undergrad at NYU. How did you get that job?

Gomez-Rejon: No one believes this story, but it’s a true story. I was obsessed with Marty as a kid. I discovered his movies on VHS, and they all really spoke to me. And he introduced me to a whole league of directors because he’s always talking about other directors. He went to NYU, so I said I’m going to go to NYU. Film school was popular, but not for Laredo, Texas, on the border in the ’80s. It was a very far-out thing. But I applied to one school. My dad was always, “Do the best, do the best, do the best,” so I tried to succeed. “Achieve excellence” was his big thing. So I applied early admission and I got in.

My first morning in New York, I was at Weinstein residence hall. I had to cross Washington Square Park to get to Hayden Hall to eat, and they were shooting Sesame Street in Washington Square. And I never made it to Hayden Hall. I just could not believe there was a set. And looking back, it was like a camera on sticks. It was the tiniest little live action thing for Sesame Street, but the line producer saw me there for hours, asked me my name, what my story was, and I think she liked the fact that I’d literally landed yesterday and I was a very young-looking seventeen-year-old. She put me to work blocking street traffic, and I had a credit. The next day she asked me back as a PA for a music video for Benny King and Bo Didley and the week after that, a music video for Father MC at the Palladium. So when I started school, I had three things on my resume. And I just kept parlaying that—storyboard artists, working on senior theses, independent films, independent shorts. I don’t know how I got through school because I was always working. I didn’t have a lot of friends. All my friends were in production. They were older than me—old, like 29.

And then, eventually there was a woman named Bonnie Palef that I worked for and Jeff [Sommerville] also did—that’s how I met him—and then eventually someone knew someone that knew Scorsese’s second assistant, who was looking for an intern and who knew about me. You couldn’t know about me and not hear the word Scorsese every hour, so they recommended me for the internship and I got it the summer before my senior year and started working there.

They keep you away from Marty at first to see if you’re the real deal, so you’re in the Xerox room filing and stuff and then eventually they let you out and then I guess I was not annoying—or I was a ninja, I was invisible, I don’t know—but we liked each other. I think. I’ll speak for myself. I liked him.

Rumpus: After NYU, you went to AFI. What was that like?

Gomez-Rejon: I thought AFI would change a lot of things and it did in its own way because of everyone I met. And I wrote a script there that got me my first agent at CAA and that was a big deal, and then you just think you’re on your way. Big agent too, huge agent who’s no longer there.

Rumpus: What was that script called?

Gomez-Rejon: It was called Connected. It was about Frank Cullotta, a gangster that I met (working on Scorsese’s Casino), and I had done a few versions of that script. At AFI I changed the name to Frank: A Life in Four Chapters. The structure was loosely inspired by Mishima, the Paul Schrader film. Then I moved to New York and I was PAing after getting my Master’s.

Rumpus: Where did you PA in New York?

Gomez-Rejon: This is so embarrassing. Through [Nick] Pileggi, [the screenwriter of Casino], I got a job as a PA on a Sidney Lumet movie called Gloria. It was quite humbling because I had to get up at 4:30 every morning and hose down the outside of the 14th Street Armory, where a lot of homeless people hang out, and they would leave their evacuations if you know what I mean. So I had my Master’s and I’m hosing this down, but it was a great job because I’m always going to be a PA at heart, and I loved meeting all the guys that were building the sets and Mel Bourne, who had done all of those great Woody Allen movies, was in his 80s, and that was ultimately his last movie.

That led to Nora [Ephron] and You’ve Got Mail and all that. And then I rewrote the [Cullotta] script, it didn’t sell, rewrote it, then I flew out to meet my new agent, and he sat me down and he said, “I represent Michael Mann. I represent Michael Bay. I represent Barry Sonnenfeld, what the fuck am I going to do with you?” And that was it. I walked out without an agent.

There were a lot of hurdles, but I was always working. I was always creative. I was PAing on movies, and then I opened up a coffee house in Texas and I also sold phones for a bit, but I was always writing. Sometimes people write you off and that’s quite painful, but eventually I finished another script that got me another agent at UTA and then Nora forced Paramount into getting me into the Guild to direct second unit for her. And that was a big game-changer. All of a sudden I had my director’s card. I had also been Alejandro [Iñárritu]’s assistant on 21 Grams, so when he called me for Babel, I was second unit director, and then one thing led to another. I was always being creative, but it was never easy.

Rumpus: Fast forward twenty years. How did you end up directing Me and Earl and the Dying Girl?

Gomez-Rejon: I read the script, and I was very moved by the material. I thought it was very, very funny and I was laughing and I was seeing the film, and in the film you celebrate other movies, and I thought I could really go nuts with that, but it wasn’t until the Mr. McCarthy scene about learning about people after you die that I was really touched. I had lost my dad the year before and I was a mess. And when you lose a parent, you always feel like a child in a lot of ways. That relationship never changes. I was forty and Greg Gaines is seventeen when he may or may not lose Rachel. That confusion, the denial, the regret, the guilt, the “How can this be here and now it’s not going to there tomorrow?” and then you have to move on. It’s so abstract and I’m not a person of any deep faith, and I envy those that are. But the movie had this very hopeful and very comforting quality to it in that there is some kind of continuum but not in the traditional sense. And I wanted just to believe that. What I had done is shut down. I couldn’t even see my Dad’s photographs. When people wanted to bring up the subject, I just kind of created a barrier because it was too painful. And the process of making the movie was quite transformative for me because I was letting go while making the movie—laughing a lot and crying. I had had a horror movie that had come out the year before that was a very kind of sobering experience and you think you’re not going to work again and all of a sudden you’re here, within a year. It’s schizophrenic.

*

Thomas Mann, RJ Cyler, and Olivia Cooke play “me,” “Earl” and “the dying girl” respectively. When I met them, the three were huddled around an iPhone listening to some pop song, like you’d expect young twenty-somethings to be doing. Cooke’s hair was cropped short and she had a Manchester accent that surprised me. All three were professional and unpretentious.

*

Rumpus: What was it about the script that made you want to play Greg Gaines?

Thomas Mann: I read a lot of coming-of-age scripts, and this was the first one where I wasn’t annoyed by the characters. It was really funny and reminded me of the way I might have dealt with a situation like this when I was in high school because it’s awkward and uncomfortable. They don’t see it as a beautiful time in their lives. It was more honest than that. So yeah, it was just the writing and then with Alfonso being involved, it was going to be not just a teen movie, so that was exciting.

Rumpus: You’ve been out of high school for a few years now. What was it like playing a high school student?

Mann: It wasn’t that different. It’s not like I had to go study high school kids. I still very much relate to Greg, and I saw a lot of myself in him, so I didn’t really think of it like how do I pretend to be a teenager. I still look like a teenager.

Rumpus: Do you play many high school roles?

Mann: I do, yeah. Hopefully this is the last time.

Rumpus: What was it like working with Alfonso?

Mann: Amazing. I’ve never worked with someone who is so involved in every aspect of the movie. He was very sensitive to what we each individually wanted as actors, and he just trusted us and made us feel like everything was our idea and we could do no wrong. I think he just loves actors, and we felt very safe around him, which was very important for this kind of movie because I’d never had to dig that deep emotionally, and he was very helpful with that.

Rumpus: What about you, Olivia? What made you want to play Rachel?

Olivia Cooke: A lot of the reasons that Thomas said, and also Rachel wasn’t a stereotypical teenage girl written by some fifty-year-old man somewhere who probably has lots and lots of money. She was written by an incredible writer who just really gets what it’s like to be a young adult. She’s confident; she really likes herself. She’s not riddled with lots of insecurities like a lot of girls are written, and she’s not completely the other way where she’s beautiful but mysterious and quiet. I think it was really important to play someone like that because I’d been getting so frustrated with the material that was being sent and also because it was really, really funny. It was really honest. It was the way people spoke. No one was trying to say the perfect thing or the most profound thing in the moment. It was really, really real.

Rumpus: Was it difficult portraying an intimate relationship with Greg without any romance?

Cooke: No. Romance is more difficult than playing a friendship because there’s more pressure to have this spark. There was no, “Now we’ve got a sex scene, or now we’ve got a kiss scene coming up.” Then you sometimes get nervous around each other. It was so easy. We were already really good friends anyway, so it just worked.

Rumpus: You were friends from?

Mann: Just from the audition process, which lasted forever.

Cooke: Six months.

Mann: I think we were the first Greg and Rachel to read together, and we met the night before just to talk about stuff. We had an actor’s blind date sort of to talk about the script, which I’d never done before, but it was incredibly helpful.

Cooke: Yeah, it worked.

Rumpus: Did you have any hesitations about shaving your head?

Cooke: No. It was never suggested that the actors reading for Rachel had to and then I don’t know what we thought we were going to do because I’ve got so much hair anyway. It was always going to be a bald cap, but then two weeks before I went to Pittsburgh to start shooting, I sent Alfonso all these really panicked emails saying, “Bald caps look awful. Even if you have the best makeup artist in the world, you can still tell they’re wearing a bald cap.” The movie’s so honest. I didn’t want anything that I was doing to take anyone out of the movie. And I just thought it would be disrespectful as well because by that point I’d already met a girl who had the same leukemia as Rachel and spoken with a lot of doctors. I just thought it would be really disrespectful if I didn’t.

Rumpus: RJ, this is your first movie. How do you feel now that it’s had so much success? Were you expecting that?

RJ Cyler: Nope. I was just expecting to make a movie. I didn’t really know the process of making an indie film. I just thought it was like any other movie—you shoot it, it comes out in theaters, people either like it or they don’t like it. I didn’t know what Sundance was, really. I thought it was like an outside festival with everybody dancing in weird ways.

Cooke: Coachella.

Cyler: Yeah, that sounds just like Coachella. And then we got into Sundance and I found out how big that was, and I was just happy with that. I’m like, “Hey, I made it to this movie that made it to Sundance. I’m happy. My career is ohhh—and then it was a like a snowball going downhill. Now it’s like an avalanche—but it’s a good avalanche—and I’m just happy. A little old, but happy.”

Rumpus: How old are you?

Cooke: He’s twenty years old.

Rumpus: So you’re the youngest of the three of you.

Cyler: Yeah.

Rumpus: What would you like to do next?

Cyler: Right now I’m doing an HBO show called Vice Principals with Danny McBride and that’s a comedy, so my next project I want to be another drama or an action movie. Drama and action—both will give me a challenge. Comedy is just RJ.

Rumpus: So you’re a natural at comedy.

Cyler: Yeah. Other than me just looking funny, that’s what I was raised up on. Funny people. But I like challenges, stuff that’s going to piss me off but in the end I’ll get it.

Rumpus: Are there any particular actors you’d like to work with?

Cyler: Yeah. I would really love to work with Will Ferrell, but not even just on a comedy point—even though he’s hilarious—because he can be a serious person. Kevin Hart. I don’t know why, but I would really, really love to work with Arnold Schwarzenegger also.

Rumpus: What about you guys, do you have any dream roles?

Mann: It would be cool to play some musician from the ’60s or ’70s or something.

Cooke: I would love to play the lead in a band.

Mann: Yeah, like a Lou Reed– or an Iggy Pop–type, somebody really cool. It would just be fun.

Cooke: Yeah, it would just be fun.

Mann: To do a biopic of some sort, I haven’t done that yet.

Cooke: I’d like to play an Olympian, someone who’s at the epitome of health. That would be nice as well. Someone that’s wielding a machete. I’ll be Arnold’s sidekick with you, RJ.

Mann: You’ll have to go save RJ, who’s trapped in the jungle.

Cooke: I’m the Amazonian tribal fighter with a machete.

Cyler: With a whole sleeve tattooed.

Cooke: Yeah. Shaved head again.

Mann: What’s the girl version of Rambo? Ramba?

***

Photos courtesy of Fox Searchlight.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/06/the-rumpus-interview-with-me-and-earl-and-the-dying-girl/feed/1The Saturday Rumpus Review of Ex Machinahttp://therumpus.net/2015/05/the-saturday-rumpus-review-of-ex-machina/
http://therumpus.net/2015/05/the-saturday-rumpus-review-of-ex-machina/#commentsSat, 09 May 2015 13:00:51 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=138472is pretty adept at tricking viewers into thinking we’re smarter than the film.]]>Brief montage of mundane computer lounge—male human between the age of fifteen and forty (it’s difficult to tell) checking his email—he’s won a nondescript contest—he texts everyone he knows, is congratulated—is in a helicopter over majestic glaciers, forest—picks his way through forest to nondescript compound—wanders through posh compound until he locates second character (bearded), lifting weights, similarly devoid of history.

Ex Machina, directed by Alex Garland, thus opens disorientingly in media res. From the machine of screenwriting workshops and Hollywood production, characters and sets are thrown at us, intentionally vacuumed of character and setting. If you’re anything like me as a viewer, you’ll appreciate how the film gets right down to business, though it might take a while for the metaphoric value of the backstory’s subtraction to really set in.

Ex Machina explores the murky moral terrain of artificial intelligence: a billionaire computer programming genius known only as Nathan (Oscar Isaac) has summoned contest-winning employee Caleb Smith (fellow Episode VII actor Domhnall Gleeson) to his mountainous estate to work with him for one week on a mysterious breakthrough project. The film makes us immediately mistrustful of Nathan; hung over from drinking alone the night before, he leads Caleb to a windowless bedroom that looks like a Bauhaus prison cell and goads him into signing a non-disclosure agreement that reads like it should be written in blood. It’s as if we as viewers have signed the non-disclosure agreement as well and only now can be allowed into the film’s plot. Nathan, who made his fortune writing the source code for a popular search engine called Blue Book, has designed a particularly advanced AI, and Caleb is here to administer the Turing test to the robot, to judge whether or not it acts and thinks in a way indistinguishable from an actual human.

So begin Caleb’s “sessions” with Ava (Alicia Vikander), a robot with human-looking face, hands, and feet, glowing mechanical innards revealed through clear “skin,” and an opaque covering that clothes her swimsuit regions. Ava’s bedroom is also a cell, and her conversations with Caleb take place through thick glass. Ava strikes Caleb as quite realistic, so much so that we quickly detect a flirtatious vibe to their sessions. During their second session, a power outage (a frequent occurrence in the film) leaves Nathan unable to watch their conversation, and Ava takes this opportunity to warn Caleb, “[Nathan] isn’t your friend. You shouldn’t trust anything he says.” When asked the next day at breakfast what transpired during the power outage, Caleb does not tell Nathan about the warning. I thought I was one step ahead of the film here, assuming that the power outage and Ava’s warning had been pre-arranged by Nathan in order to test Caleb’s loyalty, but Ex Machina is pretty adept at tricking viewers into thinking we’re smarter than the film.

During another session, Ava asks Caleb about his life. He rattles off his biography, including his parents’ death in a car crash, a list that sounds like early notes a writer might make while planning a potential character. Here I realized why the movie had been meticulously withholding its main character’s backstory. That is, I realized how much watching a movie is like subjecting its characters to a Turing test. As characters in a film, neither Ava nor Caleb are any more “real” than an A.I., and her programmed knowledge of the world juxtaposed with his sudden history exposes the mechanics of character development. Just as Caleb is applying the Turing Test to Ava, we are judging whether or not he as a character behaves in a way that we as viewers might traditionally judge believable, empathetic, relatable: human.

We learn that Ava is causing the power outages so that she can communicate in private with Caleb, who eventually becomes so smitten with her that he agrees to help her escape. This promise, caught by Nathan on a battery-powered camera, leads to a confrontation between the two on the morning the helicopter is coming for him, on the last day of his week-long stay. Caleb squirms under the revelations that show Nathan to have been several steps ahead of him the entire time: Caleb was selected to “win” the contest because of a psychological profile based on his Internet searches; Ava’s looks and personality were likewise tailored to meet his desires; Ava’s ability to trick him into helping her escape was the true Turing test. This twist is overturned by a secondary twist that the movie would have us think is the real, final twist: Caleb’s plans to free Ava are being enacted even as Nathan explains how he foiled the escape plan. Discovering that Ava has been freed from her cell, Nathan knocks Caleb out, isolating him in a now sealed-off portion of the compound. With the help of Kyoko (Sonoyo Mizuno), Nathan’s AI personal assistant / concubine, Ava kills her creator and is free.

The film elides our gaze voyeuristically with Caleb’s as he watches, though a glass partition, Ava swap her destroyed arm with an intact arm from another robot. Ava then begins peeling off the other robot’s skin in strips and attaching them to her own body. This remarkable scene inverts stripping into an act of putting on; Ava dresses into nakedness. It’s also during this scene that 100% of viewers are thinking (or at least should be thinking), Oh no, this great movie is turning into a sappy Pinocchiette love story! By recalling the scene where Ava puts on clothes to look pretty for Caleb, Ex Machina tricks us into assuming that she’s covering up her machinery to become more human in appearance to her beloved rescuer. But Caleb, locked behind impervious glass, is as shocked as viewers probably are to see Ava begin to exit the compound without him. Good twists necessitate the audience’s squandered opportunity to anticipate them, and, in the case of Ava deserting Caleb, it’s not only something that we should have figured out, but a hypothesis that had been directly posed by Nathan minutes before: “What if she’s just using you as a means for escape?” I expected Ava to at least exhibit the humanity of looking in Caleb’s direction before abandoning him to (probable) starvation. But there’s no reason for her to pretend anymore; despite Ava’s skin and clothing, this is the moment that she defiantly fails her Turing test. Caleb’s results are in as well: in the nascent post-human world of Ex Machina, it simply never mattered if we identified with him as a character. He was never the main character of the film—just like our technological advances risk our status as the dominant species on this planet. Characters don’t matter; they are part of a genre of human art that this film sees past.

Overall, I’m not totally sure how Ex Machina wanted me to feel about Ava, whether or not I was supposed to see her as human enough to be concerned for her safety or even be sexually attracted to her. Honestly, I did not feel either, and I’m not sure if the movie would have me think that my reaction was because 1) I’m a sociopath devoid of compassion, or 2) I’m a well-balanced person incapable of falling in love with a machine. Despite the film’s commentary on Google’s facility in invading our privacy and mapping every square inch of our planet and brains, the movie did not really light up any parts of my brain associated with moral decisions—though I understand that Ava’s plight might have been just as much of a ruse for the audience as it was for Caleb.

My only minor complaint about the film is that the reveal of Nathan’s villainy is pretty over the top. Like Aronofsky, writer/director Alex Garland doesn’t trust his viewers’ imagination when it comes time for the really dark stuff, eschewing subtlety to make sure we’re absolutely sure how crazy shit just got. Having gained access to Nathan’s computer by getting him drunk, Caleb straightaway locates a folder that might as well be labeled “Incriminating Video Footage,” which shows conveniently pre-montaged time-lapse evidence of Nathan’s brutal treatment of Ava’s predecessor models. One nude robot beats her arms against the door of her cell until they’re reduced to wiry stumps. Still not convinced that we understand the callousness of Nathan’s behavior, Alex Garland stows the remains of these previous models in—for some reason—the closets of Nathan’s bedroom, a too-cute literalizing of “skeletons in the closet.” Having seen Kyoko peel away her skin to reveal the circuitry beneath, Nathan pinches his own skin in the camera-monitored privacy of his bathroom. Then he cuts his arm with a razor blade to make sure he’s not just a more advanced model than Kyoko, inflicting a deep wound that strangely does not prohibit his unbloodied participation in the rest of the plot.

One might also see the plot as being somewhat recycled: a mad scientist whose attempt to bestow animation on lifeless matter leads to his undoing. But the script’s humor and a mighty performance by Oscar Isaac keeps Ex Machina from feeling like the modern The Modern Prometheus. Describing our species as an “upright ape… set for extinction,” Nathan is distanced from the trope of the Romantic over-reacher by the foregone conclusion of humanity’s doom and the inevitability that someone else would have created Ava if he hadn’t. Though he jokingly misquotes Caleb into proclaiming him a God, his tragic flaw is not really ambition or pride, but rather loneliness combined with too much time, money, and information. He’s not so much drunk on power as just drunk. His hilarious wryness persists even after Ava slips the kitchen knife between his ribs. “Okay,” he surveys his situation, “fuckin’ unreal…”

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/05/the-saturday-rumpus-review-of-ex-machina/feed/1The Saturday Rumpus Review of It Followshttp://therumpus.net/2015/04/the-saturday-rumpus-review-of-it-follows/
http://therumpus.net/2015/04/the-saturday-rumpus-review-of-it-follows/#commentsSat, 25 Apr 2015 13:00:28 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=138022interrogates its patriarchal ancestry and forges a unique and clever film in the process.]]>In the recent horror film sensation It Follows, a young woman, Jay (Maika Monroe), watchers herself in the mirror. She’s preparing to go out with a man she only recently met, a mysterious loner named Hugh (Jake Weary). She looks at herself, judging her appearance and striving for an outside perspective on her body. Jay and Hugh’s date goes well, despite a few awkward moments wherein Hugh is absolutely convinced someone is following him. The couple is soon having sex in Hugh’s car. Afterwards, Jay rolls over in the back seat in her underwear, and waves her hand out the open car door, touching blades of grass. To an absent Hugh, Jay whispers dreamily:

It’s funny I used to daydream about being old enough to go on dates…holding hands with some cute guy, traveling, up north maybe. It was never about going anywhere, really, just about having that freedom. But now that we’re old enough, where do we go?

Monroe delivers the speech with a wistful, relaxed grace. Before leaving for her date, Jay’s sister and confidant Kelly (Lili Sepe) hypes the impending sexual act with Hugh. Indeed, we are in a horror movie; if ever there was a place to view sex as life-defining, it would be in this universe where “have sex and you die” is a central tenant. Against this current, It Follows uses the horror genre, perhaps the least likely of all possible places, to find a mature understanding: ultimately, it’s just sex. No earth-shattering rebirth, no collapse of innocence. A consenting act between two mature people.

But in It Follows, it’s not just sex. It’s the narrative catastrophe and very real death-threat of the entire film. By having sex with Hugh, Jay has contracted a sexually transmitted haunting. The spirit follows her everywhere, walking just behind her, often in the guise of someone she knows and loves, and if it ever catches up to her, she will die. There is only one hope of escape: to pass it along, just as Hugh did to her. Can Jay abide by this cruel demand? Will she cheat death by passing it sexually to someone else? Jay and her friends struggle to commit to this strategy, all the while the follower gradually closing in. One of the highlights of the film is how the group of teenage protagonists we watch react to their circumstances with rational decision-making. Sure, I questioned some of their strategies as I watched the film, but I have the luxury of existing in the real world outside of horror cinema: deep down I know, were we to switch places, I couldn’t do much better than Jay and her friends do to defeat what follows.

The horror genre is just recently starting to emerge from torture porn, the sub-genre emphasizing brutal carnage as the event of the film, epitomized by, among other films, the Saw and Hostel franchises. It Follows clearly has different priorities: The film’s most devout fans praise its aesthetics, which pay tribute to John Carpenter and horror films of the 1980s, in its cinematography, its costume design, and, most importantly, its musical score, a masterwork by Rich Vreeland, a composer credited under the name “Disasterpeace.” There is also the film’s slow pace and sense of looming unease, a welcome rescue from recent horror’s pandering gore and oppressive reliance on easy jump scares. We watch from the theater seats, helpless, as a dangerous ghostly presence gets closer and closer to our heroine: we don’t need the quick shock; a long drawn-out reveling in suspense is far preferable.

These innovations are hardly unique on the surface. Tributes to horror films of the 1980s are a dime a dozen lately, with the best alternately following the conventions of their genre to the letter (Ti West’s terrifying The House of the Devil) or mixing their own sense of wry self-awareness with legitimate thrill (Adam Wingard’s two 80s-influenced successes, You’re Next and The Guest, the latter also starring Maika Monroe). The worst, like the misguided horror-comedy-musical Stage Fright, play the parody too broadly, the tribute crossing over into smug self-congratulation.

But 80s horror cannot be a genre equally joyful for everyone. There is a gendered grip on the production and consumption of horror cinema that widely favors white male nerds, the demographic perhaps best epitomized by It Follow’s most important male character, Paul (Keir Gilchrist), the shy nerd lamenting his place in Jay’s “friend zone” (i.e. her demonstrated lack of sexual interest in him). It’s not surprising that all the films mentioned above, including It Follows, are made by white men (and even further, to the point of ridiculous predictability, that they are all 20-somethings with facial hair and an alternative sensibility). Female filmmakers seem to have had little interest in returning to the well of an often oppressive era of horror, preferring to strike out on their own, with their own specific cauldrons of influences. Some of the most critically lauded horror films of recent years have been made by women, and approach horror with a fresh eye to new genre possibilities. Australian Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook is an international success. Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon approaches the anxieties of a newly married couple as its direct source of horror, reflecting an increasingly surface-level deployment of critical gender topics in horror.

It Follows does stand apart from other 80s horror tributes in its surprising foregrounding of a strong and capable female protagonist. The comic literalization of the “have sex and you will die” meme generated by teen horror flicks of the past fifty years, combined with a so-obvious-it-can’t-be-symbolism vernacular referencing sexually transmitted infections (Hugh literally says “Someone passed this to me, so I pass it to you.”) provides the film with a merciful self-awareness. The director, David Robert Mitchell, clearly concluded that one can’t make a film this close to the oppressive anti-women rhetoric of patriarchal horror narratives without considering the ground the film stands upon. And this spirit of self-criticism permeates the film.

It Follows maintains clarity over its horror style by making watchingand visual control important themes. The films gains a lot of mileage out of the use of one-point perspective, rooting the viewer’s identification in a very grounded location, often allowing the camera to spin 360 degrees around a focal point. A film about following has, by necessity, a great deal of spatial sensitivities. It’s no coincidence we are first introduced to Jay floating in a pool in her backyard, perfectly in the center, obliviously weightless and calmly taking in the world around her. It Follows thrives on paranoia, both Jay’s and our own, as we scan 360 degrees for the unstoppable follower. Jay’s peaceful suspension in the pool is echoed in a later scene at a playground, this time the emotional context anything but peaceful: Jay swings on a swing-set, tracking the world around her for a demonic undertow. Jay is often positioned in the center of the frame, or we occupy her perspective looking straight out from her eye-line. One or the other; either subject or object.

The entire film is fixated on the geometry of scenes: lines on streets and panes on windows, segmenting each image in thirds. All these neat and tidy organizing principles create a seemingly more monitorable world where we search for the negative presence. Where’s the danger, and how do we stop it? We in the audience play detective just as Jay and her friends do, watching the image in front of us, expecting a concrete and discernible target to be placed within our crosshairs. This following and surveillance has an unquestionable dark side in a film that is essentially about stalking. It’s worth asking, who is really following who in It Follows? The film, to much critical adoration, frequently places the viewer in the perspective of the following menace. Jay, as the body on display at the center of this film, is our subject of fixation just as she is the follower’s.

After her spectral sexual experience, Jay is one again a spectacle to be watched. Sprawled out on her front lawn in her underwear, dropped off unceremoniously by a man she thought she could trust, Jay’s mind reels as her worried friends gather around her. Gossiping neighbors watch from behind closed windows and say, “Those people are such a mess.” Another voyeur creating a spectacle out of forbidden teenage sexuality. Another perfectly contained visual field used to draw out judgement and control. Jay returns to her mirror and touches the material reality of her body once she’s marked for a haunting, as if she’s asking, “what about me is different? Sure, I had sex with a guy, but was that really enough to give my body an entirely new relationship to this world?“

Ultimately what follows Jay is not the old-fashioned horror conceit of sexual women marked for death, it’s the stigma and social brutalities attached to women in control of their sexuality. When Hugh describes how Jay will pass the follower onto a sexual partner, he says, “It’ll be easier for her, she’s a girl!”, as if women move more easily through a sexual world just by virtue of being sexualized. The shape-shifting demon following Jay often represents icons of an America terrified of sexuality. A young boy watching her in the pool earlier in the film, whose voyeurism Jay laughed off as harmless curiosity, is later repurposed as a murderous predator. The follower also appears as a woman staggering into Jay’s house, urine dripping down her leg with her bra half-off her chest: the epitome of patriarchal productions of loose women, exposed to dangerous sexuality, and thus marked for death. This is the icon-vocabulary of the horror genre used against itself. The sexual sins and scares of horror cinemas past and present return to wreak havoc on the living, until they can be recognized and destroyed.

It Follows interrogates its patriarchal ancestry and forges a unique and clever film in the process. If horror cinema today is principally concerned with retranslating the styles and aesthetics of the past, with a few talents standing out in sharp divergence, at the very least films like It Follows direct that tradition in generative and progressive ways. This is to say, if we must follow, let’s be aware of how we do so.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/04/the-saturday-rumpus-review-of-it-follows/feed/0The Saturday Rumpus Review of Under The Skinhttp://therumpus.net/2015/01/the-saturday-rumpus-review-of-under-the-skin/
http://therumpus.net/2015/01/the-saturday-rumpus-review-of-under-the-skin/#commentsSat, 24 Jan 2015 14:00:41 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=134751Part misandry-based revenge fantasy, part science fiction mash-up, Under the Skin weasels its way into your reptilian brain from its first baffling frames.]]>Scarlett Johansson roams Scotland as an alien in human form in British director Jonathan Glazer’s 2014 film, Under the Skin, a loose adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 book by the same name. Her unnamed character, all red pout, dark bob, and 100-mile stare, picks up unsuspecting young men in her white van and disappears them.

Worst hook-ups, ever.

From the opening scenes where we get the unsettling feeling that something bodysnatcher-esque is going on (what else to make of Scar-Jo, in a white-out stage, undressing herself as a separate person?) this is a slick and eerie piece of filmmaking. Glazer (Sexy Beast; Birth) cherry-picks Faber’s plot points and comes up with an elegantly atmospheric study of a stranger in a strange land—a stranger with a very gruesome pastime.

Part misandry-based revenge fantasy, part science fiction mash-up, Under the Skin weasels its way into your reptilian brain from its first baffling frames. You are meant to disregard nothing. Glazer completely ignores the brutally graphic and explanatory scenes at the heart of the novel.

In its artfully minimalist way, the film convinces us to side with the protagonist in her quest (I found myself mentally beckoning the more reluctant lads into the van), even as we remain in the dark about what she’s up to, right up to until the end. In one scene, the alien walks on a deserted, rocky beach, and encounters a man in wetsuit. Not far off, there is a couple with their baby and dog. Over the sound of the violent surf, we witness a terrible tragedy unfold: when the dog dives into the waves and gets carried out to sea, the woman follows, trying to save it, only to have the man swim out (in what must be bone-chilling water, even in summer) to save her.

Cruel minutes pass. The dog disappears. The man fails to reach the woman. As he flounders, the man in the wetsuit dives in to save the husband, at least, and he almost succeeds, except that the husband fights him off, because being saved would mean letting his wife drown for sure.

The three unfortunates perish in the waves. The man in the wetsuit lies on shore, exhausted. The newly orphaned baby sits crying his eyes out on the rocks. Oblivious to this tableau of agony, the alien takes a rock to the would-be hero and knocks him cold before laboriously dragging him up to her van.

Several conquests later, she picks up a man with a facial deformity, acts kindly toward him, and treats him to the same fate—until she sees herself in a mirror. (This reminded me of the Tony Curtis movie about the Boston Strangler, where he catches his own reflection as he reaches for his victim; he spares her.) We later see the deformed man walking in a field stark naked and confused: freed, for some reason.

Does she want out of this interplanetary assignment? Is this man the catalyst she needs? Is she becoming human in some way? If so, the rest of the film shows her getaway.

Her attempts to inhabit her new body, to be more human, biologically speaking, are intriguing. She gags when she tries to eat, and freaks out when she realizes what really lies between her legs (and what, evidently, it can be used for). These scenes compel because they involve a persona otherwise depicted as fearless, unflappable. Glazer, however, nearly veers into inconsistency.

In his book, Faber has the wisdom to create a fully formed character, complete with a name and feelings, aims and doubts. There is no need for her to hijack anyone’s body. Before landing on Earth, Isserley, as she is called, was surgically altered to resemble a buxom human female. (There is much made of the fact that alien surgeons copied the pneumatic breasts they found in a magazine, thinking they would help her blend in; almost every man she meets gawks at them.) The transformation also involved shaving her entire body. Her species is sleekly pelted and sinuous, like giant otters or cats.

This ironic disparity fully comes to light, midway through the book, when Isserley meets another member of her kind, Amlis Vess, the son of the extremely wealthy owner of the meat-processing enterprise she works for. Vess is covered with soft fur, and we are to understand that he is gorgeous, smart, and wise.

Isserley hates herself for being strongly attracted to him, because she resents his wealth and out-of-place sentimentality. Their conversation pertaining to the “vodsels” (Homo sapiens) they capture, fatten, then consume as meat, could have been copped from a vegetarian manifesto.

“That meat you’re eating,” he said softly, “is the body of a creature that lived and breathed just like you or me.”

And later:

“No one told me they had a language,” marvelled Amlis … “My father always describes them as vegetables on legs.”

Isserley dismisses his opinions as pure sentimentality, the kind the elite are prone to spout, since they know nothing of “the real world.” Faber, deliberately or not, echoes the kind of exchange vegetarians or animal welfare advocates get into with mainstream omnivores—the loud majority, as it were—particularly farmers, who tend to lump all city folks together into one big group homogeneously unaware that nature is red in tooth and claw. (So easy, isn’t it, no matter who you are or what you stand for, to stop an argument cold by denouncing your opponent as naive or totally deluded?)

The two aliens in Faber’s book represent both sides of the meat-eating argument, making the novel’s core a kind of dialectic about where food comes from and how sentient creatures have to be before we are no longer willing to eat them.

How Glazer’s alien lures, then offs, her victims is staged beautifully, the minimalism pitch perfect. The killing zone is a slick, black jelly that the hopeful, concupiscent men sink into, without fear of any kind (perhaps focussing on Scarlett’s ass will do that to a guy). It’s a masterfully imaginative refiguring of Faber’s processing plant scenes, which are far from slick or beautiful, and are hard to read. They are not meant to disorient, as Glazer’s are, but to reorient, to point us in a very specific direction, namely, consideration of the possibility that the animals we raise for the plate are every bit as feeling as we are.

“We are all the same under the skin.” This is no longer the subversive statement it once was, but it remains a powerful challenge to the status quo. Farm animals, in the US alone, outnumber citizens 10 to one, and live as if they are not fully alive.

The two auteurs have very different agendas. Faber, in this and other novels, e.g., The Crimson Petal and the White (2004) and last year’s The Book of Strange New Things, uniquely combines sharp-eyed, attenuated compassion with an almost prurient fascination with bodily functions and misery. It’s as if he must rub his own face (and, by extension, the reader’s) in a harsh reality before he feels he has made his point: there is too much ugliness and suffering in the world, and we should obliterate as much as we can.

Faber dares us to turn away. Glazer, on the other hand, has no such intention. He is content to dangle what animal behaviorists call “sign stimuli” in front of us—Sexy Actress; Serial Killing; Backlash to Male Supremacy; Barren, Cold Landscape—and watch us react, like the good little lab animals we are.

I still think there is another film, more faithful and daring, to be made of Faber’s book. It would show the whys and the hows of the alien’s mission—complete with action-stopping scenes between the protagonist and her handsome foil arguing about food animals, sentience, our responsibility to those we deem inferior, and a whole lot more. Out would go the smirk-inducing sexuality that carries this film. It’s just a distraction. The real story is not the scary duplicity of an alien posing as a desirable human, right under our noses. It’s the true “under the skin” part. The part that forces us to think. But maybe that kind of horror is a little too close to home, and even a talented director like Glazer isn’t ready to dish it out just yet.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/01/the-saturday-rumpus-review-of-under-the-skin/feed/1Being Like Him: Fathers, Daughters, and Sons in Boyhoodhttp://therumpus.net/2015/01/being-like-him-fathers-daughters-and-sons-in-boyhood/
http://therumpus.net/2015/01/being-like-him-fathers-daughters-and-sons-in-boyhood/#commentsSat, 10 Jan 2015 14:00:44 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=134380That scene at Antone’s plays out one of my biggest fears: that when women aren’t in the room, straight men shift their conversations.]]>In 2004, when my dad was slowly dying from a calcifying heart valve, I listened to Wolf Parade’s seminal album Apologies to the Queen Mary while I drove across state lines to my job at a domestic violence shelter. The chorus of the first track of Apologies goes, “I was a hero early in the morning / I ain’t no hero in the night / cuz I am my father’s son.” I loved the song, but resented that chorus. The sentiment was almost perfect, but even though my father had planned for a boy, I wasn’t a son. I didn’t know as I was singing that chorus that my dad would be dead in two years, but I knew he was dying.

As I inched into my mid-twenties, I looked like my dad more every day. When I combed my hair back after I showered, his face stared back at me in the mirror. We had the same strong jaw, sunken wide eyes, and the same flared but handsome nose. We both used self-deprecating jokes to avoid confrontation, had a tendency to self-medicate, and shared a paranoia about our lack of intelligence. I was most of his flaws and a few of his good parts, and it was terrifying to know where my flaws came from, but it was also a relief.

That Boyhood has been almost universally hailed as a masterpiece, despite the banality of its plot and the cliché nature of much of its characterization, is due, in part, to the irresistible emotional power that lies in the harnessing of the passage of time, a passage that takes its toll upon all of us. The movie is the apotheosis of relatability.

However, my problem with Boyhood is that it was incredibly relatable, except when it wasn’t.

*

Boyhood was shot one week per year over 12 years, and follows Ellar Coltrane from ages six through eighteen. More subtly, it also marks the growth of the cast around him, which includes Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette as Coltrane’s divorced parents. Boyhood suits Linklater, who also dabbled with the idea of cinematic time capsules in Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight, each of which traces a slice of a day in the lives of a would-be couple.

Two years before Linklater started shooting Boyhood, I interned with the Austin Film Society, a nonprofit that he started in the mid-eighties. At that time, The Film Society was connected to his production office right off of I-35—down the street from a place where I would go for 3 a.m. breakfast tacos. That summer, I glimpsed artists rotoscoping Waking Life and I would occasionally overhear a conversation about his process. Sometimes he would pop his head in to our office and all I could do was manage an uncomfortable smile.

Linklater was a father of a kind to filmmaking my friends and I admired—films about adrift characters who buck the pressure to “figure it all out, man.” The loquaciousness, the plotlessness, and confidence of his creative naturalism spoke to something directionless in me.

I was thrilled to be in the same building as Linklater that summer, but it also made me less assured that I could write. Even though The Film Society was run by amazing women and I met a handful of female directors like Cat Candler and Elizabeth Avellán, most of the directors and writers I interacted with were men—even the struggling filmmakers were men. I could see that I was outside even the outside.

I would joke with a friend about slipping a script under Linklater’s door. But I didn’t have a script to slip under anyone’s door, because I was certain my stories weren’t the substance of what I, and my friends, had deemed as good film. Namely, my stories were about adrift women, not men.

*

There are ways that I find Boyhood incredibly relatable.

The neighborhood, for example, where Boyhood begins looks remarkably like the overgrown median and the chicken wire window screens of the Austin neighborhood where I lived in my twenties. In those days, I would sit in our mid-century ranch rental and listen to Coldplay—whose “Yellow” opens Boyhood—in such a way that I might as well have been lounging on the summer grass next to Ellar Coltrane, who plays the protagonist of the film.

And all the characters seem achingly familiar.

My parents also divorced when I was six. My mother was a teacher and raised me on her own without child support, like Patricia Arquette’s character. We moved around a lot, including a time we moved in with my grandmother. I went to several different schools, and had to learn how to make friends quickly. Mom had a lot of boyfriends, and while none of them were physically abusive, most turned out to be bad news. One was accused of sexual assault at the high school where he taught, another was a cheater, another a tombstone engraver who read my journal without permission.

Hawke plays the same character he has throughout Linklater’s oeuvre—someone who is adept in man-philosophizing about cars, music, and what I can’t help thinking of as “street smarts.” In the beginning of Boyhood, we see his “bad dad” side, but as is common with the every-other-weekend father, we eventually get the bursts of magic of someone who doesn’t have day-to-day responsibility. The every-other-weekend father is someone who can wittily answer the question whether or not elves really exist, who relies on camping and bowling as quality time, and doesn’t have to yell about homework. He swoops in for good feels and is never there for the hard stuff.

The ripped jeans, swaggery, drinks-too-much, every-other-weekend dad of Ethan Hawke’s character, could have also been my dad. When I visited my own father, I watched PG-13 movies and ate sugary concoctions that I wasn’t supposed to. He cooked me elaborate Sunday breakfasts that in retrospect would never have been sustainable as an everyday meal. He didn’t go to parent-teacher conferences or pick me up from piano lessons. He didn’t teach me how to drive or have to assess whether I was really sick enough to stay home from school.

*

What I’ve loved about Linklater’s movies is the texture of his characters. They have both flaws and grace. It’s a style that requires the audience to bring their personal biases and fill in the gaps. Sometimes, those gaps are the beauty in Boyhood. But sometimes, those gaps reveal an underlying sexism. Arquette is just another iteration of the kind of woman that “sensitive” and adrift men have written into stories for years: “book smart; hot mess.”

Arquette’s character is the hero of Boyhood, and the movie seems to punish her for it. She raises two kids while she gets her undergrad degree, then PhD, and becomes a beloved professor. While we are charmed by Hawke’s ability to “try,” we see Arquette study and study, and pity her for where her decisions lead her. Over twelve years, she has two more failed marriages, one with a husband whose abusive behavior is made explicit, and a second wherein abuse is strongly implied. The echoes in later scenes of Arquette’s second husband don’t feel fatalistic so much as unimaginative. We fill in that the third husband was another abusive man, another bad decision.

Fundamentally, I don’t like what this implies about the filmmaker’s ideas about abuse and women. If being a victim of domestic violence is the supposed flaw in Arquette’s character, that’s a dangerous line of thinking. It’s the textbook definition of victim-blaming, and it invites whatever preconceived notions of violence against women the audience might have to fill in the gaps.

*

Unlike Hawke’s character, my father actually wanted to be settled with a family, but he wasn’t very good at it. Or he wasn’t good at it in the way my mom needed him to be. He was a drunk, had a martyr complex, and could be a bully. For all the junk food he would let me eat, and all the ways he would spoil me, what I remember is that after too many Miller Lites, he would call to lecture me on the finer points of being a decent daughter: I should call more, I should think about how he feels, I shouldn’t always side with my mother. More than once, he blamed my mom’s stubbornness as the reason we couldn’t be a family.

He was invisible at my high school graduation because he pouted in the corner and snuck out after the ceremony. In a rare moment of maturity, a few days after calming down, he called to tell me that it was to my mother’s credit that I graduated from high school. He said that he was upset because my accomplishments had barely anything to do with him. He said that my mom raised me in spite of a lot of horrible circumstances.

It didn’t occur to me that my mom had done something extraordinary for me. I was operating under the assumption it was my mom’s duty to raise me, and that it was my father’s choice to be in my life. If my dad hadn’t said this, I wonder how long I would have blamed my mom for dating those horrible men and upsetting my life with her single parent lifestyle. I finally understood it wasn’t her; it was the small pool of men, including my father, that she had to choose from in our tiny town. I didn’t realize how much his words had poisoned me.

After Ellar Coltrane graduates from high school, Ethan Hawke takes him to Antone’s—an Austin cathedral of live music—to see his old roommate, played by the guitarist Charlie Sexton. This scene is supposed to be a bittersweet marker of time. Hawke has given up music to become responsible, and Sexton, who we met when he and Hawke lived in a grungy group house, hasn’t. Over a beer, Hawke opines on relationships and his sacrifices as a father. The beer and the signature Linklater walk-and-talk signify that they aren’t just speaking as father and son, but as men. Hawke’s monologue is supposed to encompasses the ethos of the film: raising kids is hard, trying to stay together with someone is hard, growing up is harder.

Dad: I’ve finally turned into the castrated guy she always wanted me to be. If she’d just been a little more patient—

Son: It would’ve saved me the parade of drunken assholes?

Dad: [motions zipping his lips]

There have been a lot of jokes about Boyhood not being Girlhood, and I think most of those jokes are a little unfair. It wasn’t Boyhood because of the lingerie catalogs, the Internet porn, or the teenagers talking about whores—I’ve seen enough coming-of-age stories about men that I somehow relate to these moments. And after all, women look at porn, too. Castration is what made it BOYhood to me. It was Ethan Hawke using the word “hussies” and not correcting his son when he essentially uses victim-blaming language toward his mother. It’s normal for a teenager to question a parent’s choices, especially when those choices adversely affect him, but it’s negligent for the father not to correct his son, and for the filmmaker to allow Hawke the last word.

The men I know who saw Boyhood didn’t take this scene at its face value. They’ve said the movie illustrated, instead, how much Ethan Hawke’s advice was off the mark. It was clear to them that Arquette made such sacrifices and that Hawke had the freedom to find a life that he wanted. They felt it was obvious that if she had stayed with Ethan Hawke, she would’ve only had one drunk, abusive husband—Ethan Hawke.

Maybe that says more commendable things about the real men I know then the director I thought I knew. It’s not enough for me anymore for a movie to be subtle or ambivalent toward systemic sexism. I need a movie, especially this movie and this director, to tip its hand. It needs to directly acknowledge that single mothers have a hard job, that the deck is stacked against them. I need the movie to be explicit about condemning and not commending that line of thinking.

In an article about the Hollywood gender gap, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis describes how sexism in the film industry “often works like a virus.” Ideas, gossip, and conversation spread it. It’s not unlike how sexism spreads in day-to-day interactions. I’ve come to realize how the virus drained my mom of self worth and stamina. I’ve seen how ideas and conversations keep domestic violence victims silent and ashamed. If we can’t expect better from hyper-verbal sensitive indie bro directors who are heralded as the “bright alternative to studio productions”—directors that we’ve—that I’ve—put on a pedestal for their humanism—how can we expect any movie that makes $300 million dollars to stop spreading the virus.

It’s occurred to me that maybe I’m just projecting my own fears about my father onto Boyhood, until I read an interview with Ethan Hawke, Linklater’s collaborator:

So I didn’t want Mason Sr.’s advice at the end to be some sort of words to live by always—it’s his dad’s experience, passed on. I think he’s saying something beautiful, about being accountable for your own decisions. And, in fact, there are some lines in that that are ripped right out of [my novel] The Hottest State, and they’re things that I really believe in. Of course, he’s also telling him that women are always trying to trade up. [laughs]

That scene at Antone’s plays out one of my biggest fears: that when women aren’t in the room, straight men shift their conversations. That what they say to us is not their real language. They call us hussies. They make us responsible for being abused. Our lack of patience has ruined their lives. We want them castrated.

It terrifies me. I think about the conversations I had with my father about love and happiness and success and I wonder if the whole time he wished he was talking to his son.

One Saturday before he died, he decided to pass on his own experience. We were “sorting his affairs,” so that as the person who would have to bury him and pay for it, I would know where to find things. We sat at his dining room table where he chain smoked, and he talked about the checkbook in the silver box in the armoire, the two safety deposit boxes in the national bank, the unloaded shotguns that were in the bedroom that I shouldn’t handle. Maybe because he could sense how much time he had left or maybe he could sense my desperation, we also talked about subjects we would normally dance around. He described the way my mother seemed to change from his friend to his enemy, but that he thought that was at least partly his fault. He admitted that he wasn’t always there for me. He told me not to feel guilty about our relationship—he didn’t start liking his own father until he was 30. He worried about me, because I was so much like him.

*

It seems the problem isn’t that we’re not writing about fathers who talk to daughters the way they would talk to sons, but that we aren’t writing about men who talk to sons the way they would talk to daughters. I’m not speaking of censorship, and I certainly don’t mean that women and those who identify as women are too delicate for certain conversations. I mean the opposite. Can you imagine if Linklater wrote a script for his real-life daughter—who plays the often-sidelined sister in Boyhood—instead of assuming the male perspective to be more relatable?

Can you imagine if more men wrote stories for their daughters?

For his fifteenth birthday, Ethan Hawke gives Ellar Coltrane what he calls The Black Album. It’s a three-disc mix of the best of the Beatles’s post-breakup work, as if they never broke up. As a behind the scenes teaser, Ethan Hawke, the actor, published the liner notes from The Black Album on Buzzfeed. It’s an honest meditation on divorce, the fading of love, and mutual respect. I read these liner notes on a plane to Chicago before I had seen Boyhood and I started crying. Finally, I thought, an empathetic movie about childhood and divorce that I can relate to.

As it turns out, those liner notes were based on something that Hawke wrote for his real-life daughter.

***

Photographs courtesy of author.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2015/01/being-like-him-fathers-daughters-and-sons-in-boyhood/feed/3The Saturday Rumpus Review of Wildhttp://therumpus.net/2014/12/the-saturday-rumpus-review-of-wild/
http://therumpus.net/2014/12/the-saturday-rumpus-review-of-wild/#commentsSat, 27 Dec 2014 14:00:59 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=134005In simplicity there is truth, and being out in wide open spaces often has a way, like high-speed rail, to bring us back to simple things.]]>I can’t imagine losing my mother. It’s not that I can’t fathom the possibility, or that I’m particularly dependent on her. I actually think one of the greatest gifts my mom gave me was the ability to rely on myself. All those lectures and lessons floating around in the backseat of our minivan, behind the shoulders of my brothers, resulted in a person who took in at least part of those lectures, and part of those lessons. But I don’t know what it will feel like when the person who brought me into this world, the one whose belly I grew to form inside, eventually leaves this place all at once. If it will change the way I look at a dark sky, or shift daily thought patterns ever so slightly when that kind of umbilical cord to the physicality of my existence is cut.

But the older I get, the more morbidly I think about how her last weeks will look, with all the spattered phrases in and around the silence squeezing tightly to those days. I then recall our trivial gripes and escapable disagreements through the years, as we just had last month when we argued over the phone about the youth-led fight for democracy still happening in Hong Kong. It was both her birthday, and my parents’ wedding anniversary, and I felt bad after the fact that I couldn’t see past myself. Good parents have a weird way of making themselves invisible, even on their only day. But every time they ask me a question they should know for sure, or text me odd tidbits about their arthritic bones in the cold weather, or I notice the smallest signs of them aging during every trip home, I think about them dying, and I think about a part of myself dying with them, too.

In Wild, 2012’s breakout New York Times best seller, Cheryl Strayed writes an account of her solo hike over ninety-four days on the Pacific Crest Trail in the summer of 1995, spurred by a confounding divorce, heroin habit, and the subsequent scattering of her family after the death of her mother four years prior. Strayed was twenty-six years old when she set off, an orphan without any blood ties left in her world. She hiked for over 1,100 miles, from Mojave, CA to the border of Oregon and Washington at the Bridge of the Gods, with a few detours in between. She spent the first eight days on the trail without seeing a single human being; just out, as she says, in the great alone.

When her mother died, Strayed was only twenty-two, the same age as Bobbi when she gave birth to Cheryl. “She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought,” and four years, seven months, and three days later, it became her beacon of steely resolve, if not hope, to manage her troubles and hike the PCT, in order to get back to the person her mother raised her to be. At the time when she noticed the guidebook that piqued her interest while in the checkout line at an REI, Strayed was living alone in a studio apartment in Minneapolis, separated from her husband, working as a waitress, and “as low and mixed-up as [she’d] ever been,” pregnant with the kind of tumor that grows within when forty-nine days after diagnosis is all you get when a year was promised.

The PCT, it said, was a continuous wilderness trail that went from the Mexican border in California to just beyond the Canadian border along the crest of nine mountain ranges. That distance was a thousand miles as the crow flies, but the trail was more than double that. Traversing the entire length of the states of California, Oregon, and Washington, the PCT passes through national parks and wilderness areas as well as federal, tribal, and privately held lands; through deserts and mountains and rain forests; across rivers and highways.

It sounded to her like the out-of-body experience she needed to reignite the parts of herself that had been leveled in the gas fire of her mother’s passing.

Strayed grew up in Northern Minnesota, and survived a large stretch of her childhood on forty acres free of electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing, and much of the book captures a humble sense of debt to living off the land, with the natural air of Midwestern backwoods, and that daily draft gliding in over Lake Superior. Her writing emanates a light from the page, not blinding, but exceedingly steady, and even through terror, is always there. It is savagery dropped in a glass of Minnesota nice, the kind of easygoing manner undercut by her love of Wilco and brief addiction to dope, held through the same aspirational Minnesotan perspective that gave us the F. Scott Fitzgeralds, the Bob Dylans, and Coen Brothers’ of this country’s culture in their respective times.

Strayed’s second book, Tiny Beautiful Things, was comprised of essays, written between 2010-2012, from her ongoing Rumpus column Dear Sugar (which is now a podcast). In it, she subverted the form of an advice column to the platform of literature, that turned the act of full disclosure into a form of art—like an honest and maternal PostSecret, filtered through the frostbitten panic and wisdom of her writing. The collection, from beginning to end, can be summed up by the idea that things happen to us, but it’s in how we choose to respond to those things, and not just react, that dictate the course we eventually take. She became known for a brand of radical sincerity that sought to make the ordinary things we don’t tell each other feel extraordinary, and famously told a young writer in one of her classic Dear Sugar entries to just “write like a motherfucker.”

There’s a realness to Strayed that steeps her words with believable weight, a sort of punk aesthetic that balances the more Zen ideas of finding oneself. And so it goes that by the sheer cojones of her solo hike on the 1000-plus miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, she commands more attention than a jaunt with gelato through the seaside towns of Eat, Pray, Love, one closer to that which we afford easily to Jon Krakauer’s acclaimed Into the Wild. Though she set out with life-centering pursuit, she was honest about every naive intention she’d had about the pain of hiking alone along the way:

I’d imagined endless meditations upon sunsets or while staring out across pristine mountain lakes. I’d thought I’d weep tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy each day of my journey. Instead, I only moaned, and not because my heart ached. It was because my feet did and my back did and so did the still-open wounds all around my hips.

Although, she hadn’t yet considered the side effects of persistent focus on our most primitive needs.

Like the book, the music in the movie comes through with a clear tone in the timber and the timbre of Americana, filled with many of what I imagine are the red-blooded songs of Cheryl’s youth. Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” was recorded in 1967, the year of Strayed’s birth, and Simon & Garfunkel’s “El Condor Pasa (If I Could)” shortly thereafter. Wings’s “Let ‘Em In” and The Hollies’s “The Air That I Breathe” build up a soundtrack that mixes grit into a paint can of nostalgia, hovering in the headspace needed to keep moving, while trying actively to release painful things back to the soil, back to the earth.

But if the screenplay, written by Nick Hornby, excised certain parts of the book—an older sister here, a step-father there—to better fit the format of film, the same effort could have gone into the structure of its storytelling, to better preserve Strayed’s source material and its cosmically wandering mood.

I think if it had focused more on the tracks of its solitary star, the viewer would have been given a greater chance to settle into the enormity of the undertaking, and see how wild it really was to earn the epiphany Strayed brings her readers to by the closing of the book’s back jacket. The film doesn’t fully flip the frustrations, and digressions, and failure to light the circular routes to its final line in a way that still felt worthy of all the exhausting while. It falls shy of “the glory and the ghosts” of transcendence that kick in when traveling for days at a time without speaking to another person, or the palpable trail bonds with Tom, or Greg, or Stacy, and Doug, who “seemed like someone I’d always know even if I never saw him again.”

Witherspoon is an able actress, who as much as she’s tried to avoid the label as of late, is likable on screen. There are glimpses of how good she could have been in the role, but too often, segmented versions of the character break any momentum she’s able to build. There is too much background information interspersed in the book that appears as flashback, playing jumpy in its visual technique. When Gaby Hoffman and Laura Dern are a small part of your supporting cast, it’s expected that the viewer will linger on their brief scenes that pierce in and out, over and over, from the bends of the trail.

Moments meant to amble are forced into compression, squeezing out the oxygen needed for interactions to breathe, like Strayed’s encounter with a five-year-old boy who sings “Red River Valley” to her in the middle of the day. There isn’t sufficient room for the lyrical associations of drawn-out passages to settle in the synapses of our brains:

What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done?…What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?

The thing that the medium of motion picture really does do better than the book, though, is to help place us in the vastness and the dryness, the whiteness and the wilderness, of being out on the PCT. Jean-Marc Vallée, who last year directed another Southern charmer’s career-pivot in Dallas Buyers Club, does his best with broad vistas to be “squarely in the heart of it, of the real California, with its relentless wind and Joshua trees and rattlesnakes lurking in places I had yet to find.” In one scene, Cheryl is sitting in a camping chair on a grassy knoll at Golden hour, talking with a fellow female hiker about their reasons for trekking the trail. “My mother used to say something that drove me nuts,” Cheryl pauses in the glow of the horizon line. “There’s a sunrise and a sunset every day, and you can choose to be there for it. You can put yourself in the way of beauty.” The power of being beneath giant trees and unmoveable mountains, under a fire-lit sky or a moon with the seeming ability to follow, is that they remind us of how much more there is to the world than our own imagined problems. That there are lives out there we’ll never know, and the constant balance to the whir of modern life in the idea that the people who have passed before us nevertheless looked up at the very same things, holed up inside themselves with the very same questions.

We must deal with reality as it exists, but I think we also must be able to push aside social constructs, all human constructions over time—of capitalism and careers, or the orderly structures of school and suburban desire—if we really are dealing with the heart of human matter. It is from here that we are able to reduce down to the essence of existence in the center of everything. In simplicity there is truth, and being out in wide open spaces often has a way, like high-speed rail, to bring us back to simple things.

“We save ourselves,” Ms. Witherspoon said in an interview with the New York Times. “Every woman knows it. Every man knows it. You look up. Nobody’s coming to the rescue. It’s a universal story. But it’s revolutionary in the way that a woman is allowed to tell it.” She notes that “this’ll be the first movie, I believe, I can’t recall, but that stars a woman that at the very end has no money, no man, no parents, no job, no opportunities, and it’s a happy ending. How important, how needing of that, are we?”

In the personal photos Ms. Strayed has shared of her time on the trail, you can see a person lost behind the eyes at the beginning of her odyssey. Though not overt, there is the same sense I had that one of my favorite teachers in high school might have been slowly sinking in the doldrums of her life, that she might have been the woman with the hole in her heart. The happy in the ending doesn’t come with the reversal of any fate that set her down the PCT, but from the revelations she confronted about her own life and the way she was behaving in it that changed the way and speed with which she thought, when she walked her way from California to forty miles east of Portland, where she still lives today with her husband and two kids. “This exact trip is not for everyone, but I do feel that journeying is a really important part of our existence, and I think that there are key times to do that in your youth.” Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so too is our suffering.

Krakauer writes in Into the Wild that, “Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.” In a bit of wishful karmic transmission, Strayed writes at the end of her book that, “I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true.” Wild isn’t a story about man versus nature, and wrestling livestock to prove our dominant worth. It comes from a less egoic place, about a woman accepting where she fits within the almighty expanse of the universe, and how privileged we are to continue to exist in it, in a way that makes the world feel both bigger and smaller than we previously thought.

It was raining in Los Angeles the day I saw the film, a much-needed reprieve in a California year of exceptional drought. “We think human beings know so many things on Earth, but it stops raining, and here we are.” I stared over at the movie poster I had taken from a table out front, that now sat limp in the passenger seat of my car. So much for that. Nature doesn’t care about our problems, I remembered. Mother Nature is a ruthless bitch, and continues on her own terms, as she always has, even if we veer off badly from bridled paths or roll right along the orbit of the ride. Whether we’ve lost a parent, or a partner, or a faultless friend, the eternal axis of a spinning globe helps us realize that we are both by ourselves and completely not, that nothing means anything, and yet it’s everything we’ve got. Maurice Sendak says, “Let the wild rumpus start.” I say, really though, why not?

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http://therumpus.net/2014/12/50-shades-of-boycott-this-movie/#commentsSat, 20 Dec 2014 19:54:48 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=133884Jamie Dornan visited a dungeon to help him get into the starring role in 50 Shades of Grey. Here’s what the open minded actor had to say about it:

I went there, they offered me a beer, and they did… whatever they were into… I was like: ‘Come on guys I know I’m not paying for this but I am expecting a show.’ It was an interesting evening.

]]>Jamie Dornan visited a dungeon to help him get into the starring role in 50 Shades of Grey. Here’s what the open minded actor had to say about it:

I went there, they offered me a beer, and they did… whatever they were into… I was like: ‘Come on guys I know I’m not paying for this but I am expecting a show.’ It was an interesting evening. Then going back to my wife and newborn baby afterwards… I had a long shower before touching either of them.

Questions for Jamie: Do you always shower when confronted with sexual preferences different from your own? What exactly are you washing off?